The present invention generally relates to methods and equipment for cutting food product.
Various types of equipment are known for slicing, dicing, shredding and granulating food products. A particular example is the DiversaCut 2110® manufactured by Urschel Laboratories, aspects of which are disclosed in patent documents including U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,472,297 and 3,521,688. The DiversaCut 2110® is adapted to uniformly slice, strip cut, and/or dice a wide variety of vegetables, fruits, and meat products at high production capacities. A portion of a DiversaCut model is depicted in FIG. 1 as an apparatus 10 comprising a casing 12 that encloses an impeller assembly 14. Food product 16 is delivered through a feed hopper (not shown) to the impeller assembly 14 as the impeller assembly 14 rotates on a horizontal axis within the casing 12. Centrifugal force holds the product 16 against the inner wall of the casing 12 as paddles 20 of the impeller assembly 14 carry the product 16 past a slicing knife 22 mounted on the casing 12 and oriented roughly parallel to the axis of the impeller assembly 14. The product 16 moves outward across the edge of the slicing knife 22 to produce a single slice from each individual product 16 with each rotation of the impeller assembly 14. In the embodiment shown, the slices enter circular knives 24 as they radially emerge from the slicing knife 22, with the result that the slices are cut into strips 26 as the slices continue to travel under the momentum originally induced by the impeller assembly 14. The strips 26 then pass directly into a rotating knife assembly 28 equipped with crosscut knives that make a transverse cut to produce diced product 30, which is then discharged from the apparatus 10 through a discharge chute 32.
As evident from FIG. 1, the circular knives 24 are located entirely outside the casing 12 and impeller assembly 14, and therefore engage the food product 16 only after the product 16 has left the paddles 20 and slices cut therefrom have been produced by the slicing knife 22. While the arrangement works well for processes in which slicing is the first operation performed on a food product 16 and each product 16 is gradually sliced over the course of multiple rotations of the impeller assembly 14, this arrangement is not adapted for processes in which individual food products are desired to undergo a halving operation, in which products are cut once and then expelled during a single rotation of the impeller assembly 14.